Professor Edmond Cooley, Thayer School’s chief IT strategist, and Dr. Joseph Rosen, an adjunct associate professor of engineering and a plastic surgeon, were invited to participate in the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2006, “Computing at the Center of Transformation.” Rosen spoke about creating a network-centric telemedicine system that will aid health care in Vietnam. Cooley researched emerging technologies.

Professor Brian Pogue, director of Thayer School’s M.S. and Ph.D. programs, won the 2006 Graduate Faculty Mentoring Award, based on student nominations. In other news, Pogue and Professor Keith Paulsen Th’84, part of a research team testing new imaging techniques to find breast abnormalities, including cancer, recently published their latest findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In honor of the upcoming International Polar Year (2007-08), the Geographical Society of Philadelphia awarded a $1,000 grant to Rachel Obbard Th’06. Obbard, who earned her Ph.D. in June, specializes in the microstructural properties of ice. She uses scanning electron microcopy and confocal Raman spectroscopy to investigate the location of different chemical compounds in ice. Two of her ice photographs won first- and second-place prizes in the 2006 International Metallographic Contest.

During the 2006 International Business Plan Competition at the University of San Francisco, doctoral candidate Ashifi Gogo won the $500 Social Venture Award, which recognized the proposal with the greatest potential to effect positive social change. His presentation was about WOSPRO (that’s “wiki-farming and open-source processing”), an effort to use virtual reality, social networks, and the internet to link organic farmers in Ghana and elsewhere to global markets. Gogo is chief technical officer of WOSPRO, a joint effort of Thayer School, the London School of Economics, and the Institute of Marketing in Kumasi, Ghana.

Christina E. Behrend ’07 won a $7,500 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship for academic merit. She plans to earn an M.D./Ph.D. in neuroscience engineering and conduct research on robotic limb prostheses.